Campaigns and traffic sources

Overview

Users arrive at your website or application through a variety of sources, including advertising campaigns, search engines, and social networks. This article describes how Analytics collects, processes, and reports the campaign and traffic-source data.

If you're experiencing unexpected fluctuations or inconsistencies in your traffic, use this troubleshooter to identify and resolve the issues.

Understanding campaigns & traffic sources

In Analytics, the ad campaigns, search engines, social networks, and other sources that send users to your property are collectively known as campaigns and traffic sources. The process by which campaign and traffic-source data is sent to Analytics and populated in reports has the following steps:

Describes the referring source and may set dimensions when no other campaign or traffic source fields have been set.

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Note that each session can be attributed to only one campaign or traffic source. Thus, if new campaign or traffic source values are sent to Analytics at collection time in the middle of an existing session, it causes the current session to end and a new session to start.

Source precedence—A direct-traffic visit that follows a paid-referred visit will never override an existing paid campaign. Whatever is the latest paid campaign visit is listed as the referral for the visit.

Campaign precedence—Each visit to your site from a different paid source—such as from a paid search-engine link, a Google Ads link, or a banner ad—overrides the campaign cookie information set by a previous source.

One Campaign Per Session—Each visit to your site from a different campaign—organic or paid—triggers a new session, regardless of the actual time elapsed in the current session. Specifically, a change in value for any of the following campaign URL parameters triggers a new session: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_term, utm_content, utm_id, utm_campaign, gclid. For more information on sessions, see How a session is defined in Analytics.

Processing paid search-engine referrals

A session is processed as a paid-search referral when custom campaign parameters or Google Ads / Google Marketing Platform click IDs are used in the ad's destination URL and are sent to Analytics in the document location field.

Learn more about how to verify that Google Ads auto-tagging is working.

If custom campaign parameters or click IDs are not used, the session may be processed as organic instead.

Processing organic search-engine referrals

Search-engine referral data is processed by comparing the hostname and query parameter of the document referrer field to a list of known search engines and their query parameters. The first known search engine that matches both the hostname and query parameter of the document referrer value is used to set the report dimension values.

Note that most Google searches are performed via HTTPS, which causes the keyword dimension to automatically be set to (not provided).

Processing social-network referrals

Social-network referral data is processed by comparing the hostname set in the document referrer field to a list of known social networks. The first known social network that contains the hostname string is used to populate the source dimension in reports.

Processing direct traffic

A session is processed as direct traffic when no information about the referral source is available, or when the referring source or search term has been configured to be ignored. Learn about referrer and search term exclusions.

Reporting

After processing, the following campaign and traffic source dimensions and metrics are available in reports:

Dimensions

Web Interface

Core Reporting API

Description

Source

ga:source

The source of referrals to your property.

Medium

ga:medium

The type of referrals to your property (e.g. email, cpc, etc.)

Campaign

ga:campaign

The name of a marketing campaign sending users to your property

Ad Content

ga:adContent

A description of the advertising or promotional copy used to send users to your property.

Campaign Timeout Period

Existing campaign or traffic-source data for a particular user will be overwritten by new campaign or traffic-source data, regardless of the configured timeout period. Campaign timeout is counted from the time a specific campaign was first recorded.

Excluding Referrers and Search Terms

Users can exclude certain referring sources or organic search terms from reports by setting these exclusions at the property level.

To prevent "self-referrals" in web measurement, where sessions are attributed to a referral from your own domain, you should add the hostnames you are measuring, as well as the hostnames of any third-party payment gateways, as excluded referrers. Learn how to exclude a referrer and exclude search terms.

Processing flow chart

The following flow chart shows how dimension values are determined based on campaign and traffic-source parameters sent to Analytics in a single hit.